


And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

by sixpences



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-30
Updated: 2008-11-30
Packaged: 2017-10-03 02:49:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixpences/pseuds/sixpences
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every journey is just a series of moments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

_Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;  
He will not see me stopping here  
To watch his woods fill up with snow._  
\- Robert Frost

"So this one time, when I was a kid, I found this gigantic frog in the back yard."

She looks away from the bland rolling tarmac of the interstate to raise an eyebrow at him. They're an hour out of DC and, after an initial fifteen minutes fiddling with the radio and a half-baked attempt to get her to sing back-up on 'Rock the Casbah', these are the first words he's said to her.

"A frog," she repeats flatly.

"A _gigantic_ frog. Maybe the size of a dinner plate. Though did you ever think about that, what _is_ the size of a dinner plate? It's not like you can't get them in different sizes."

In a contest between Mulder talking about peculiar amphibians and Mulder talking about the mysteries of crockery, amphibians win. "So what about this frog?"

"Oh. Well, just that it was, you know, really big. I called it Jeremiah, like in the song." He grins at her and she sees the same expression on a gangly, dark-haired boy, tousled and muddy, like a fleeting reflection. "Jeremiah hung around for about a week, then I never saw him again. I always wondered what happened to that frog."

"And why are you telling me this?"

"C'mon Scully, we're partners. I can't tell you about frogs I have known and lost over the years? Don't you have any tales of reptilian woe?"

"Amphibian woe."

"Your woe can go underwater?"

"No, yours can. A frog is an amphibian, Mulder, not a reptile. Don't you tell people you went to Oxford?"

"Didn't cover a lot of wildlife in Introduction to Psychology. I bet you used to experiment on them in med school, though, frog dissection and stuff, like in biology class. Alas, poor Jeremiah! I knew him, Horatio: a frog of infinite jest."

He is, she thinks, surely the most ridiculous man she has ever met.

  
Minneapolis-St Paul Airport is humming with people, the everyday shuffle of commuters, families, and she likes to imagine, sometimes, that they're just another pair of people heading home, that her life does not involve psychics and alien abductions and vast government conspiracies and an alligator-slash-lake-monster that ate her dog.

But cheap airport coffee is still awful whoever you are, and Mulder is making steady progress through a bag of sunflower seeds, spitting the hulls into the trashcan six feet away for the benefit of a pair of admiring boys whose dad isn't paying the closest attention. She wonders how long he must have spent practicing that.

Suddenly he's all tension, two seeds spilling from his fingers, and her hand is on her gun before she can even think, eyes following the angle of his head. At first there's only the crowd and then, there...

A thin woman with long, dark, curling hair in a braid down her back, maybe in her early thirties. She turns, and her eyes are wide and sad, but unfamiliar. The breath escapes Mulder's lips in something like a sigh. Scully reaches over to squeeze his hand and he reciprocates numbly, as if not really aware of why she did it. It happens, sometimes, in crowded places, when his mind isn't honed razor-fine on a case, and she knows he thinks she doesn't notice, doesn't know. It's not as if it would mean anything to say that the smell of the sea is still her father coming home, that every shock of strawberry blonde can be Melissa running on ahead of her. At least she always knows it's not true.

Mulder wriggles down a little further in his seat and starts picking at the sunflower seeds again. His eyelids slide to half-mast, as closed as they'll ever be.

  
Black umbrellas. Standard issue. The rain slides off the back of hers in long sheets, splattering at the backs of her legs. Mulder kicks sullenly at one of the car's tires.

"You know Scully, in this country, when I pay money for a thing, I kind of expect that thing to work. I expect that when I go into a car rental place, and say 'Excuse me, I would like to hire a car', they are not going to take my money and give me a car that does not actually work! I have rights, Scully! We have a constitution!"

"I don't know that the Founding Fathers were really thinking about car rental, Mulder."

He makes a face that resembles nothing so much as a strangled gopher, the water planing forward off his umbrella in his own private cascade of misery. She pulls out her cell phone.

"I'm assuming that you exercised your constitutional right to get a package with roadside assistance. Do you want to call the rental company or shall I?"

He takes a deep breath, casting his eyes heavenwards as if seeking inspiration from any UFOs that might happen to be passing, but there's only the great, grey weight of clouds, and the rain hurtling down from them.

"Might as well get back in the car, I don't think it's about to blow up right now. I'll call the rental place."

Their fingers brush as he takes the cell phone from her outstretched hand, and she can smell his shampoo over the heavy, green scent of the rain. His hair is slipping forward into his eyes, and she wants to brush it back, to trace her fingers across the skin of his forehead. Maybe there's a map there that could help her navigate the curious pathways beneath.

She shakes out the umbrella as she ducks back into the passenger seat, scattering raindrops over the dull interior of the car like spots of lycopodium powder. Mulder's jacket is crumpled on the back seat; discarded evidence. She files away every clue.

  
The gas station is like a hundred others she's seen along thousands of miles of road, and there's only a battered looking truck pulled up drunkenly around the back. She eases the car in alongside a rather forlorn looking pump, and unbuckles her seatbelt.

Mulder jerks awkwardly when she prods him, as if his long limbs have fallen slightly out of alignment in his sleep. He grasps at the air for a few moments before his hands settle on the car door, the side of his seat, the chunky plastic buckle that he fumbles with for a little too long before managing to free himself. He rubs his palm over his eyes.

"What'd I miss?"

"Road. A crow. Some more road. A yellow car. A blue truck. A roadkill sasquatch. More road."

His eyebrows waggle sleepily at the word 'sasquatch'. "And was El Chupacabra driving the truck?"

"No, he had the car. It was Big Bird in the truck."

She pushes the door open just as the attendant appears. Mulder, still not entirely awake, manages to explain to the man their need for gas. She rolls her shoulders, willing the travel-ache out of her muscles. They've only been on the road a couple of hours since their early flight got in to Houston, but it feels like she's cramping all over. Mulder comes up behind her and she turns, squinting; the sun frames his head in an unlikely halo.

"Hey Scully, you want anything?" he says, gesturing towards the squat little store that the attendant had scurried out of.

"Diet Coke? And something with chocolate in it."

He half-grins at the contradiction, and she grants him a small smile in return. The shadows of his face are curving and soft.

  
It's eight in the evening in Nevada when their plane takes off, chasing the night eastwards. She's in the window seat, because paper does beat rock no matter how ridiculous Mulder thinks that is, watching the airport lights fading away beneath them. She's got the casefile open in her lap, and really she ought to at least pretend to do some work before they land, if only to save a dull hour or two of write-up when she finally gets home, but she feels restless still, her fingers skittering across black lines of type.

"Scully, can you open these?" Mulder's packet of complementary peanuts drops unceremoniously into her lap. She picks it up.

"Are you having trouble with the instructions?" she asks, showing him the reverse side, which is emblazoned helpfully with '1) Open packet. 2) Eat nuts.' He pokes her in the ribs in response, and she laughs, picking carefully at the packet until the plastic breaks. She passes it back to him but he holds on to her hand, tipping out half the peanuts into her palm.

"I've got my own," she protests weakly. He's still holding her hand, his thumb running along the side of her little finger.

"We can share those too," he says. He's half-turned towards her, his head resting at an angle in the gap between their seats. His breath whispers against her ear. She pulls her hand out of his slowly, and pops one peanut into her mouth. She can feel his eyes on her for a little longer than they should be, before he settles back into his own seat. Out of the corner of her eye she can see him fiddling with the packet still.

"If you're bored, you could make yourself useful. Actually write a report, or something."

He mumbles something non-committal, but leans over and takes a handful of papers out of her lap. Outside the window she can see the flashing light on the end of the wing, a little way ahead, carving red lines of code into the star-soaked sky. Mulder's fingers tap out a secret message on the armrest.

  
After far too many years of med school and the FBI she's used to the colours of pre-dawn, sunlight that isn't quite sunlight moving pale across the curtains, but the same cold, ethereal light filling the room an hour or more after sunrise sets a child-like thrill in her heart, and she sits up in bed. There's a wet thump at the window.

"Scully! Scully! Come on outside!"

She pulls on her sneakers and the motel bathrobe, and yanks open the door. She screws up her face in shock at the cold air and it's a moment before she sees Mulder a few feet away, his sweater on backwards over his pyjamas and a scarf wrapped haphazardly around his neck.

"It snowed!"

The entire parking lot is draped in thick, still white, like blank canvas, the whole motel transformed back to some crisp, unauthored page, ready to be redrawn.

"That tends to happen in Vermont."

"Come on, I want to make a snow reticulan before it starts melting." His face is red with the cold and the glow of sheer enthusiasm; it's almost contagious.

"Mulder, we have to-"

"I think Champy can maybe wait for us a few hours more. He's been there a million and something years already."

There are a hundred and one sensible reasons to say no, to go back inside and put on some real clothes, or at least to point out that just because there has been an unusual spate of boating accidents on Lake Champlain in the last year does not mean that there really is a prehistoric creature attacking fishermen. But the bright, quiet winter morning doesn't seem like the time for things she says and does every day of her life. Mulder's face is as changed as the world around them, like a book falling open.

She pulls the door closed behind her and scoops a handful of snow from the hood of their car as she passes. A bird has been there before her, leaving footprints in hasty, scattered ellipses, circling twice, three times before the little stutter of snow that signals takeoff. It's a cipher she's starting to read.


End file.
